Brett's A-Pop Blog

The movie Better Luck Tomorrow reminded me of my own adolescence growing up in the suburbs. Minus the crime syndicate and murder. Mostly. It reminded me of how much of a bubble it is to live in suburbia, especially as a satellite to a larger city. It’s too small to have its own distinct identity, but generally there’s one common thread between all of suburbia: boredom. I saw Better Luck Tomorrow as taking this idea of suburban boredom and ennui and showcasing how apathetic it can make some people, obviously to an exaggerated extent. The town I grew up created this same sense of apathy in a lot of people as well, leaving them to their own devices. Living in such a bubble, especially one that was voted the #1 safest place to live according to some in-flight magazine, makes it hard to truly consider the gravity of your decisions. It always felt as if this atmosphere invited people to behave in cruel ways simply for entertainment value. Since I’ve been four years removed from living in that suburb, it’s given me a lot of time to think about how a place like suburbia functions, and why it is that way. I still hold the opinion that suburbia is one of the strangest living communities to be in, just based on what’s on the surface vs. what bubbles underneath it. One girl I knew put it as living in a place that was “physically safe, but mentally and emotionally unsafe.” I thought the film played on the idea of apathetic boredom in a really great way, with the ending sort of creating this open ended scene where you don’t actually know if it has resonated with the main character that he has killed the boyfriend of the girl he is now seeing. It made me think of something that happened right before I moved away where two guys that lived in my town got into a fight over a girl, and one of them stabbed the other in the heart, which killed him. The ending of this movie made me think of that and wonder, “Because of this bubble that we lived in, did the gravity of that situation ever really dawn on him?” I think that’s a really terrifying thought.

Posted in Scissors | Comments Off on suburbia

• “Culture” and “Nature” being the two most confusing terms (Raymond Williams)
• Culture being:
  • “intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development”
  • “a particular way of life, people/period/groups”
  • “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity”
• Clifford Geertz: “(Culture) is simply the ensemble of stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves”
• Williams and “popular”:
  • well liked by many people
  • inferior kinds of works (don’t know if I missed more of this..)
  • work deliberately setting out to win favor with the people”
  • “production and destruction”
  • made by people for themselves
• Storey (and various problematics) on popular culture:
  • culture that is well liked by many people
  • what is left after what is decided as “high culture”
  • the culture which originates from “the people”
  • Gramsci and hegemony – struggle between dominant and marginalized cultures
  • postmodernism – no distinction between “high” and “low” culture (relativism)
• Common denominator: “popular culture is a culture that only emerged following industrialization and ubranization”
• “Splendid Messiness”

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashise: 

• one note in relation to Otsuka: the focus on water, especially represented in a dreamlike manner
• Further viewing: Emiko Omori – Rabbit in the Moon (the psychological phenomenon of looking at something and it appears to be something else)
• Further reading: Alison Landsberg – Prosthetic Memory (collective trauma)
• Collective trauma and Otsuka: “I want to be sick by myself”, said the girl. “That’s impossible,” said her mother.

Posted in Paper | Comments Off on Assorted Notes: Week 2

I’m still in the process of narrowing the topic for my paper more, and hopefully the researching process helps me get more of a clear focus. I decided that along with focusing on my childhood I would also focus on the Midwest, where I spent the entirety of my childhood. I want to try not to homogenize Midwest culture because there are a lot of distinct and complex aspects to it as far as being a cultural location.

I’ve decided to focus more on one APIA group in a Midwest setting to narrow my topic more, which hopefully I will know by next week. I have a film to watch this weekend to help start my research called My America . . . or Honk If You Love Buddha by a documentarian named Renee Tajima-Peña (thanks, Chico). From what I’ve read of it so far it’s a documentary on Tajima-Peña driving around the country and examining what it means to be Asian-American in a racial landscape that has drastically changed since her childhood. It’s also inspired by On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which is a book I never read but have heard people talk about enough so that I think I have an okay understanding of the general plot. Maybe. We’ll see. I’ll talk about what I took away from the movie next week.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Project Thoughts pt. 2

Minidoka No. 5 (442nd), Roger Shimomura

While at the Tacoma Art Museum I saw this piece by Roger Shimomura, an artist from Seattle, entitled Minidoka No. 5 (442nd). According to the corresponding information it was created in a pop art style, a movement most known for being pioneered by Andy Warhol, and was created to confront the stereotypes that are associated with Asian Americans. It also serves as a piece to pay tribute to the Japanese American men who were in the U.S. military during World War 2, in spite of being prisoners due to their ancestry.

I guess I just wanted to make a post about this piece because it was my personal favorite that I saw at the art museum that day. I really loved how it specifically used the pop art style to convey its message, considering the works by Andy Warhol utilized American iconography like Campbell’s Soup and Marilyn Monroe; two things that are associated with dominant American culture in the 20th century. I also noticed that, in comparison with the Marilyn Monroe piece by Warhol, the men represented in each of the portraits are distinct, whereas the Monroe piece only shows the same picture of her over and over again, creating this narcissistic and homogenous effect. The Monroe piece was made soon after her death to memorialize her, but again through Warhol’s lense it seems narcissistic and self serving. This piece actually memorializes these men, while also subverting the stereotypes of the Japanese army, and Japanese men during World War 2.

I’m not really a great art critic, but this piece appealed to me due to the fact that it borrows from a style that has become iconic and ingrained in the American consciousness for years, despite the fact of it being glorified navel gazing and mostly devoid of any real meaning in my opinion, and makes it into something deeply personal and meaningful. Anyways, my opinions on Andy Warhol aside, I’m glad I was fortunate enough to see this piece in person, especially considering the reading this week.

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I’m still in the process of working out what my idea of “home” truly is. So far I think the closest thing I can think of to what home is for me is my childhood and growing up. It seems like sort of a broad concept, but I’m thinking I can study different portrayals of adolescence through the lens of Asian American/Pacific Islanders via different media such as films, short stories and novels.

I think as far as the creative side of this project is concerned the concept of childhood could generate a lot of narrative possibilities. I’m just afraid that it is too broad that I’ll get sort of lost while trying to portray it, especially while trying to present it alongside through the lens of APIA pop culture. But, I would be interested in seeing if there are significant intersections between my experiences during adolescence and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, even though that is not a group that I belong to.

At the very least I’ll try to tighten this up with some specific examples of portrayals in pop culture of APIA adolescence and start drawing connections between my experiences and theirs, and maybe try to focus on one aspect or medium within pop culture.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Initial Project Thoughts

• I’m interested in how Japanese audiences (and original creators) reacted to the film vs. Asian American audiences
• Japanese ghosts in white shells – purpose? Does this change anything about the ideas of the source material?
• Heavy Chinese and New Zealand production influences (based on credits)
• Are Kuze and Major the only ones who have the Japanese ghost/white shell combination?
• Was the setting supposed to be a Neo Tokyo or Neo Hong Kong-type setting? If so why was everything so bare in terms of the actual population outside of the non-Asian cast?
• Considering the majority of the cast is non-Asian, is the setting needless?

One extra note on Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction: 

• One aspect I found really intriguing that Hsu talked about was the self exoticism that some Asian American entrepreneurs implemented in order to make a living (i.e. Chinatown and how that commodified exoticism, and the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker)

Posted in Paper | Comments Off on Some Notes on “Ghost in the Shell”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of the Major’s new Scarlett Johansson body being referred to as a “shell” in the movie. This thought mostly persisted in my head because of the saying referring to someone as “a shell of their former self”. I haven’t seen the original film, or read the manga, but I would assume the usage of “shell” referring to the new body would be pointing to the disconnect of the original soul and the new manufactured body, slightly altering the wording of the theory of the “ghost in the machine”. Going back to the “former self” saying, given that Scarlett Johansson’s character is revealed to be Japanese, does that add a new dimension to that saying? Her new body is capable of doing extraordinary superhuman things, which supposedly wouldn’t lead someone to levy that claim against her physically. But is she a shell of her former self in that her soul now inhabits someone of a different race, furthering the distance between the soul and the body even more? I don’t think the film addresses that, with the reveal of the Major’s past seeming more like a cheap way to keep the character Japanese while also keeping Scarlett in the role and having a needless twist.

Posted in Scissors | Comments Off on Jumbled Thoughts on The “Shell”